Adam Lovinger has built a career at the nexus of law and national security. He spent over a decade in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and served on the National Security Council in 2017.
Today, he is vice president of strategic affairs at the Gold Institute for International Strategy. He also teaches at Georgetown University and is the author of The Inside Threat: How the Deep State Undermines America from Within.
Lovinger entered the national security field after 9/11, when his background in project finance caught the Pentagon’s attention. “The Bush administration … thought it was a good idea to … not only … liberate [Iraq and Afghanistan] … but also to remake those countries,” he says.
Working as associate deputy general counsel for international affairs at the Department of Defense, he encountered friction with the United Nations. “They took every opportunity they could to bash America,” Lovinger says.
His experiences abroad exposed what he says are deeper structural problems. “We’re losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because we have no strategy to win them,” Lovinger says.
He attributes the failures to corruption and bureaucratic self-interest. “War generates opportunity for new bureaucracies,” he says. He claims the D.C.-establishment is “really happy” despite the failures “because crisis … keeps the money flowing.”
Lovinger saw Donald Trump’s election as an opportunity to disrupt the system. “Trump … was truly an outsider to Washington,” he says. “He didn’t have to make … corrupt deals to climb the rungs.”
Lovinger joined the National Security Council under General Michael Flynn, a longtime colleague, to “clean up” what he describes as corruption that is “getting in the way of America achieving its strategic objectives.”
But Lovinger became a target of the institutions and organizations he has criticized. He calls the pushback a “weaponization of the federal investigative process,” and says it is all-too easy. “I was really surprised how easy it is to weaponize investigations,” he says. “You just say, ‘I don’t like this guy,’... and you launch an investigation.”
At one point, Lovinger’s security clearance was suspended without explanation, and he was subject to five investigations—three criminal, two administrative. “They got nothing,” he says.
He credits his survival to pro bono legal representation he received. “There are thousands of people who have experienced what I experienced,” he says.” He adds that, “some of them commit suicide,” referencing Dr. Chris Fitzgerald, for whom a whistleblower protection act is named. “They call it administrative due process because it’s the opposite of actual due process.”
His book sheds new light on Operation Crossfire Hurricane, and offers an angle from within the Pentagon. According to Lovinger, beginning in 2010, the Office of Net Assessment started finding reports by an individual he describes as “the world’s most infamous presidential election interference operative.” In his book, he claims the person was working with the former head of Russian intelligence, which meant that “Russian disinformation” was allowed to be added to reports for the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Lovinger calls for sweeping reform to root out what he says is abuse of the security clearance system. The Trump administration has met his concerns relating to some individuals who, according to Lovinger, “need to have their security clearances suspended on day one.”
He also expresses a lack of confidence in the inspector general system. “We have to stop living in a fantasy that these inspectors general can actually check and balance the very agencies that pay their salaries,” he says.
